Wine Merchant Directory Blog
 First, we’ll start with a simple definition, then we’ll move on to a more complex one. What we call natural wines are wines made with the least possible use of chemicals, additives and overly technological wine making procedures. That includes chemicals in the field, such as pesticides, as well as things like sulfur or any of the almost 200 allowed additives that are legally permitted in wine. And it includes many technological manipulations of wine that erase the individuality of the product and the place it comes from–the terroir. This definition of natural wine is very similar to the German purity laws of beer making, which say that beer can be made only of water, barley, and hops. Purely natural wine, is made of grape juice and little else. There are a lot of ways one can get to a wine we would consider natural. They include organic and biodynamic grape growing. But grape growing is just that: what is done in the fields. For a wine to really be natural for us, the same philosophies must continue into the winery up until bottling occurs. Biodynamic Wine Biodynamic grape growing is a type of organic viticulture that uses special preparations of herbal sprays and composts, and time their applications according to the lunar calendar. Biodynamicists look at their land as a complete living ecosystem, as a living being that needs biodiversity in order to be healthy. Biodynamic wine makers often also live and work in a farm, with wheat fields, animals, fruit trees, woods, and vines striving to be self-sufficient. The soil is not seen as the surface for production but rather is considered an organism in its own right, and preparations are used to enhance the micro-life in the soil. The soil is part of the context of lunar and cosmic rhythms. While some of the techniques of biodynamics often sound strangely spiritual to the layperson, they in fact date way back to the ancient ways of our ancestors, to a time before many technological manipulations existed. Rudolph Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, is often credited with having laid out the basic tenets of biodynamics in a series of talks he gave in the early 20th century. Steiner gathered together the oral traditions passed down by simple farmers for thousands of years. Many of these ideas were based on the work of monks such as the Cluny sect in France that spent countless years tinkering with various mixtures and timing of preparations to find what worked best, on a trial and error basis. Many organic vineyards use some biodynamic tools, so there is often no clear-cut line between organic and biodynamic. Biodynamic certification also costs money, so just as with organics many biodynamically prepared wines do not say so on the label. So what is natural wine again? For a wine to be considered natural, it must also be vinified as naturally as possible. This means that after it has been cultivated organically or biodynamically, there must be a minimum use of additives and technological manipulations. Examples of additives include sugar, acidifiers, and powdered tannins. Manipulations can include the use of spinning cones to remove alcohol, micro-oxygenation to accelerate aging, and the use of laboratory cultivated yeast. The key aspects of what is considered to be a natural wine are:
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